


The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow

by lyryk (s_k)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/F, F/M, Supernatural Spring Fling 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 08:16:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10658592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/s_k/pseuds/lyryk
Summary: She lets her borrowed blood spill for him like a trail of crumbs, knowing he’ll follow.A/N: Title stolen from Gabriel García Márquez.





	The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Balder12](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/gifts).



“Penny for your thoughts,” Sam says one afternoon, voice muffled against the pillow his face is half-hidden in. He’s sated for the moment, his desperate energy spent for now, her blood still staining his mouth and the insides of the skin he wears like a suit he’s long since outgrown.

The phrase is un-Sam-like, said in the haze of a pseudo-afterglow. She shouldn't ratify it with a response.

“Shower,” she says, rising on bare feet and catching, from the corner of her eye, the reflection in the tawdry mirror of the body in shorts and tiny top that he has no eyes for. (Neither does she.)

Sam follows her into the bathroom, the invisible shadows around him filling up the cramped space like steam. She takes his wrists and presses his hands to the glass partition of the shower, turning his back to her, the curtain of his hair falling into his eyes. A quick spread of Sam’s coconut-scented shower gel on her fingers, and she’s easily sliding two fingers into him. “Just like that,” she praises as he spreads his shaking legs wider to let her in, the running water mapping the skin of his back in tiny rivulets.

Sometimes she wishes she could buy him a new skin, unzip him from his DNA as easily as her kind discard their suits of meat and bone.

 

—

 

There are old photographs hidden like secrets between the pages of a paperback, crumpled with old rain, in the backseat of Sam’s car. With anyone else they’d be a cry for help, maybe scattered on a dresser-top for anyone to see, or displayed in carefully-chosen photo-frames veneered with shiny, lovingly-polished glass, or pasted into a family album in chronological order, births and weddings and funerals and everything in between, all the paraphernalia that makes up a (human) life, as though an artificial narrative with pretend beginnings, middles, and ends in the form of little scraps of glossy paper could make up for lives unlived.

(All right, so maybe she’s a little bitter about everything she doesn't have.)

But there’s Sam, who has none of those fake odds and ends lying around to masquerade as meaningful souvenirs of a life pretend-lived. The trinket he wears around his neck on a well-worn thread (soaked with someone else’s blood and sweat) is one of the few possessions, other than his weapons and his car, that he takes with him everywhere. He wears both the amulet and the Impala like ill-fitting borrowed clothes that he has no real claim to, both catching the sun on bright days in a way his eyes don't manage to.

 

—

 

“Meg,” Ruby says, trying the name for flavour. The ordinariness of the name slips through her mouth like water, colorless, odorless, chameleoning its way down her throat like its owner, dipping into her insides and filling her up with the sameness of them both, whispering _Demon, demon, I am you, and you are me._ How Meg would laugh if she knew the kinds of thoughts that go through Ruby’s mind these days.

“Not bad at all, as far as hand-me-downs go.” Ruby meets Meg’s appraising gaze in the mirror. They’ve been exploring each other’s new vessels with enthusiasm.

“How was your trip?” Ruby almost winces at how domestic that sounds. _Sameness, sameness._

“Heard something interesting.” Meg’s hands are on Ruby’s shoulders. She twists Ruby’s hair into a makeshift braid, pulls it to one side. Her mouth grazes Ruby’s skin like Sam’s never does. “Remind me to tell you later,” she says into Ruby’s ear, and drags her to bed by her hair.

 

—

 

“Ruby,” Sam says just before his teeth sink into her skin, and she lets him drink deep.

Ruby like the gemstone. Ruby-red like blood. Red like a riding hood. She’s tried on a lot of personas for size: one of the perks of the job.

Sam like Samuel, Sam like Samson. She sinks her fingers into the silk of his hair, strands spilling dark over his face. Meg’s news aches inside her, wanting to spill itself into him like her blood, and as his teeth puncture her wrapped-on skin, opening her veins like a gift, she lets her mind wander.

 _I know where he is_ , she’d say. _I can take you to him, help you get him out._ Sam’s face would shatter open, and a Sam she’s never known would claw his way out into the light. Maybe she really will tell him one day. One day soon. But for now, it’s better in the darkness where his shadows overlap with hers, where he’s just the same as her, where it’s easy to pretend that a different blood isn’t running through his veins, yearning for its kin.

She lets her borrowed blood spill for him like a trail of crumbs, knowing he’ll follow.

 

—

 

“Told him yet?” Meg’s tone is conversational, as though she isn’t on all fours, panther-like, over Ruby’s spread-open body, her fingers and mouth unerring.

“No.” She’d be more articulate if her thighs weren’t trapping Meg’s hand between them, her back arching as her mouth opens around the word with a gasp.

 

—

 

Loyalty to someone like Lilith always comes at a price, but that price doesn't have to be — cannot be — Sam Winchester.

Ruby sees the usedupness of him as soon as she walks into the room, the skin taut over his face and his knuckles like drying parchment, and if it’s blood that'll heal him, she knows it’s not hers. After she helps him get his brother back, there won’t be days like these. (If Lilith finds out, there won’t be anything at all.)

She takes him for a last reckless drive before her words slit her open, their bodies crashing together in the darkness of the motel room, the curtained-shut windows letting her believe one more time — just one more time — that he really is like her. (And perhaps he genuinely is, in all the ways that don’t matter.)

She stays outside while he showers, rehearsing the words she’ll say when he emerges. Redemption demands practice, after all, like the best of performances. Betraying her own kind has never seemed so easy. There’s something real inside him, something that she and her kind, with their pseudo-similar bloodlines, stolen and tainted, can’t touch, even if he doesn’t know it yet. She’s going to pull it out of him with her words, say _I know where Dean is, I’m going to take you to him_ , and maybe he’s going to pull her with him, take her where her kind can’t follow.

His hair is still wet, curling over his ears and the nape of his neck, and her words still unsaid, stuck in her throat, when there’s a knock at the door.

Pretending to think Dean Winchester is a pizza delivery guy is one of her finest performances. They should have awards for this sort of shit. She watches them reunite, their shared blood slamming them together like magnets locking into place.

Relearning the art of performance is like falling off the proverbial bike. “So are you two, like, together?” She epitomizes confusion, tone and expression and body language pitch-perfect. Jane Campion would be proud.

She’s proud of Sam as she leaves; even ripped open, he’s good enough to play along. He has, after all, learned from the best.

 

—

 

“Lost your plaything, have you?” Meg’s mouth twists in a way that Sam’s never has. She’s liquid grace as she moves toward Ruby and presses her up against the cracked-plastered wall.

“Shut up and fuck me,” Ruby says, and it’s that easy, falling into sameness all over again.

 

~end


End file.
